I had more time to digest the debate from Tuesday night, the debate, the ABC News debate, and I got a couple of thoughts, a couple of sort of I don't Basically, one of the things I did was I listened through all of the stuff about abortion.
I listened through all of that very carefully.
Basically, for those who don't know, this is my I think this is the stuff that I have to do to make my show interesting.
I hate debates.
I hate political debates, and I really hate State of the Union addresses. And I think a lot of talk radio gets dominated by those two things. And I've sort of made it my personal mission to be different by not just obsessively listening to and talking about those things. So I was on vacation when the debate happened. I
didn't watch it live. Didn't want to watch it live since then though, for Right to Life, and we'll do we'll break this down tomorrow morning on Right to Life Radio Right to Life Radio at nine am here on Power Talk, where my Right to Life Radio producer Colton he stitched together. We did this thing where I was live reacting to the whole section of the debate that talked about abortion, and so I was live reacting. I hadn't heard any of it before, and I was reacting
in real time. And I came away with this, and in reading some of the reactions to the debate in other quarters, it seems like Trump's performance in the abortion section was similar to his performance throughout the rest of the debate, which is that Trump didn't do didn't do a very good job. Now I could tell that the moderators of the debate were terrible. I think the problem is, though, that this is what was happening. Trump is so imprecise when he talks, and frankly, that's part of his genius.
It's part of why he's attractive. That he isn't highly polished, that he isn't consultant driven, that he isn't just an empty suit repeating lines that his consultants tell him. He actually has a personality, He actually wants to do things his way. He has an actual existence in a way that Kamala Harris does not. Kamala Harris is an empty suit.
She is a.
Stand in an avatar for the Democrat Party in general, the same way Joe Biden was.
She is.
She clearly had her talking points she stuck with them. She stuck the landing for the most part. She didn't do anything spectacular, but she seemed focused said the things she was supposed to say.
Whereas Trump is.
I'm not saying Trump was winging it, but a little bit was winging it. He has certain themes he likes to go back to, but he also isn't super fluid with them. He doesn't have this stuff boom boom boom boom ready to go on the top of his head. And he has certain kind of personal obsessions that aren't really true and that maybe not even true, but just
aren't really effective. So, like listening to the abortion section, Trump has certain things he says that are true but imprecise, and so the media moderators were able to say that he was lying. Trump was talking about how Kamala Harris and Democrats support abortion policies for allowing abortion of children after they are born, basically allowing children to be and Trump used the word executed after they are born. The media moderators jumped in for Harris to say, there's no
state where that's legal. Now, the problem is that Trump is imprecise. Trump says they're allowing them to execute babies after they are born execute, which implies active killing. What is actually happening.
Is that.
Governors like Tim Walls in Minnesota have passed legislation to eliminate any kind of protection for children who are born alive after surviving an abortion, basically to say that children who are born alive following an abortion have to receive the same kind of care as a child who is wanted would receive that basically, children who survive an abortion attempt,
and there's a decent number of those per year. It's not I don't think it's even one hundred, but it's in the tens every year, that those children should be given the same kind of resuscitative treatment you would give a wanted child. Democrats have stripped away language of that sort from state law after state law after state law,
including in Tim Walls's Minnesota. Not just in the abortion context, though this also tends to happen in the context of nick us, where a child is born with some kind of disability and the docs and or the parents just decide, well, we don't want to resuscitate this baby, even though it might be not a life debilitating, not a life life
threatening disability. It might be something like spina biffida, and knowing some families who have children with spinea bifadae, I mean, I just find that revolting where basically they will just leave the baby to die rather than take care of the baby. That's what Trump is meaning when he says they'll execute the baby after they're born. And then he
brings up the quote from Governor Ralph Northam. Ralph Northam around twenty eighteen, who was both a doctor and the governor of Virginia, said, you know, after a baby is born, maybe if the baby survives an abortion attempt, you know, the parents and the doctor would have a conversation and then would decide what to do. Basically Governor Northam saying, well, we would decide if they don't want the baby, we
just wouldn't take care of the baby. And that quote from Governor Northam a quote he said a week before revealing that for his medical school yearbook he either dressed up as a clansman or in blackface, we weren't sure which. Northam basically revealed this ethic on the part of the pro choice of pro choice people within medicine of just saying we're just gonna let a child die rather than provide resuscitative care when the child isn't wanted. And that's
the thing. Trump's trying to say that, but he can't. He lacks the precision, he lacks the knowledge, he lacks the debate chops to actually communicate that effectively, and he wanders off into stuff that unless you know about the issue, like I do, you have no idea what the heck he's talking about. When he starts talking about the governor of Virginia said we would set the baby aside. I know what that story is. I know the context of that story, but I'm a pro life activist. That's literally
my job. I knew about that story in twenty eighteen when it was happening. I know about that story today. Most Americans have no idea what Trump's talking about. When they hear Trump saying they'll execute the baby after they're born. The governor of Virginia said so, and then the ABC newsperson comes in, there's no state where that's legal. Vice President Harris by bah bah bah bah. What do you
have to say to that. There's this lack of precision and this ability to sort of meander off into these things that he likes to say, but that just don't work. That just don't land. Talking about the whole Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs thing was a distraction. It's a thing that revs upright wingers on Twitter, but is kind of seems bizarre to the average listener and turns into this bizarre debate on whether or not Haitian immigrants in Ohio are or are not eating cats and dogs, which
is a distraction from the main points about immigration. How the Biden administration allowed immigration in this incredibly reckless, extreme way with no vetting and millions of people coming into the country.
Who we have no idea of their security threats or not.
And it seems like it was the same way on issue after issue after issue, and where Trump was getting distracted by things that he cares about that nobody gives a darn about.
Did you win the twenty twenty election or not.
Nine percent of America, ninety percent whatever, are not ish interested in relitigating.
The twenty twenty election. They're just not. You might be hung up on it. Trump is clearly still hung up on it.
Most Americans, especially the swing voters he needs to get, don't want to hear about the twenty twenty election anymore. They don't want to hear about the twenty twenty election anymore. They don't want to hear some pickyun little debate about whether or not the sizes of Trump's crowds at his rallies that he got all defensive about.
Nobody gives a darn. It's irrelevant.
Trump would have done a better job if the whole debate instead of answering a single question or responding to anything, Kamala Harris said.
Just had a list, Just had a list.
Ground beef at the end of my you know, ground beef at the end of my administration was on average throughout America two dollars and thirty nine cents a pound. Today, the average cost of ground beef is four dollars a pound. A gallon of gas was da da da per gallon. Today it's da dada. The average cost of a home when I left office was da da da one hundred thousand dollars. Today it's da da da da da. The average cost of this was da da da da da. Today it's da da.
Da da da.
Then average number of border crossings on the day that I left office was dad da da da per month. Today it's aboutda da da da per month. There were no wars going. You know, the United States was tangentially involved in no wars when I left office. Today it is tangentially involved into on and on and on and on. He could just hit on those things, and he he
just gets distracted from these things. And that's always been the tale of Trump, I guess, is him getting distracted, allowing himself to be distracted, allowing himself to draw the conversation into something else instead of doing a stump speech where he just sticks to his message. He had libs, He gets bored, he says stuff that interests himself rather than staying on message. Whereas Kamala Harris, Like there were some Republicans who were mocking Harris because she gave the
exact same stump speech five or six times. She didn't deviate, Like, she didn't deviate at all for five six straight stump speeches.
Oh what a robot. Yeah, that's called campaigning. That's why it's called a stump speech.
You have ones, you have ah stump speech, maybe two stump speeches, and you hit him and you hit them, and you hit him and you hit him and you don't go off message. Why because when you go off message, it has the opportunity to screw you up. And I guess I'm just afraid that we're headed for a twenty twenty repeat where the media is gonna do so much
work for Harris, it'll be really close. If there are shenanigans to happen, then shenanigans will happen, and we're just gonna lose narrowly again because Trump won't deviate from how
he does what he does. And I think that the point is, I don't know that he has the capacity or the desire for issues that don't really interest him but which are important still, because I have seen him go into real specificity for certain things that really interest him, stuff about trade, stuff about certain kinds of economic questions, like there are things where he can really be engaging
and really get into it. But for stuff that he clearly doesn't care as much about, like the abortion issue, he's very imprecise, and it allows the media to blast him. It makes him look bad and sound bad. So I don't know, I'm I feel like we're heading towards another twenty twenty and again, my constant, my constant proviso for my constant sort of caveat rather for all of this is he's one one more presidential election than I have.
He's also lost a presidential election, though, and we saw how he lost it.
He didn't lose it.
Well, who is occupying sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue right now?
Okay, yeah, he lost it, Get over it. If he's gonna win, he's gonna.
Win, like clearly, like Democrats really didn't want him to win in twenty sixteen.
Okay, Like all right, anyway, So.
I just feel like were headed towards another twenty twenty the longer we go on and and it it. I feel really frustrated at how the Democrats were able to get an early debate with Biden in time for them to remove him. I feel like that was deliberate on their part, that they that Biden's handlers agreed to it, because they were like, we got to see if Biden can hold up, and if you can't, then we got to do something to switch them out.
So they throw them to the wolves.
They'd throw him out for a live debate, and Biden bombs allows them to switch out for Harris.
And I think there when we return.
I want to talk about whether they're they, Whether Trump should agree to another debate, and the double haters. That is next on the John Girardi Show. Should Trump agree to another debate? Yeah, he should. And and this is this weird kind of Trump pride thing playing in. Trump clearly did not win the debate. He clearly didn't Winning or losing a debate is a reflection of how people reacted. And the reaction, for the most part is that from a lot of people on the right and everyone on
the left, is that Trump didn't do very well. I really just don't think he did that well. Now was it a crushing Harris win?
I don't know.
Will anyone remember it on November fifth? I don't know, maybe not. And I guess I'm sort of two minds whether Trump should agree to another debate. Harris wants another debate and Trump doesn't. Now, my initial thought was Trump is crazy. He didn't do very well. He needs to do another debate and do better so that he can kind of get.
Another leg up.
And my thought was that Harris should, you know, back out while she has the chance, take her victory and walk. I sort of thought, you know, Harris should do the thing like George Costanza did, where there was a Seinfeld episode where George Costanza realized he had, like, if he had one good funny thing to say during a meeting, he should just immediately leave the meeting, leave the meeting
on a high note. So I sort of thought that's what Harris should do, but that instead we have the opposite reaction, because I think what Harris and the Democrat team have realized is the following Trump's not Trump's going to be about that level of prepared.
For a debate.
And Trump was able to win the debate against Biden because Biden was just completely senile and everyone could see it. It wasn't because Trump was some devastatingly great debater. I think Trump was kind of locked in and focused and did a decent job during the CNN debate. And I think the CNN moderators were much more fair than the ABC moderators. But you know, it's Biden lost that debate far more than Trump won it. It was it wasn't like Trump
was giving some masterclass. I think the Harris people realize if they can just keep getting performances like that, Harris is going to win. Because Harris is basically taking no risks. She's just staying on message. She's not getting tripped up, she's not getting confused, she's just answering. She's just giving her scripted answers. She's not going to get challenged on anything.
She says, she's just going to give her scripted answers, and that actually more debates might help her and hurt Trump. So I guess my initial reaction was Trump is crazy. Why doesn't he want a debate again? He needs to debate again so that he can do better this time. But I don't Now I'm wondering if that's not the case. I think probably Trump and his team privately understand that Trump didn't do very well, and they probably understand, hey, if he goes out and does that again, it's not
going to be good. So they're gonna say, all right, well, we're just gonna stop. And we're two months out from the elect well a little less than two months out from the election, maybe seven weeks. Passage of time will allow people to forget much of how that debate performance went, and we'll just you know, Trump seems to do better in the in between stages where we're having rallies having rallies, having rallies, and we're building, building, building, So maybe that's what we got to do.
We'll just focus on that. And I guess here's my fear.
When it was Biden versus Trump, the thing that people were talking about were the double haters. Basically, this contingent of voters who didn't like either choice, really disliked both choices. I think a lot of the distaste was, why are we voting between a seventy eight year old and an eighty two year old? Is there anybody in America younger that we could vote for here? Is this really the
two best people we could have? There was distaste, dissatisfaction with both, and especially after the Biden debate performance, there are a bunch of Democrats who were like, forget this, this is ridiculous. We're not voting for an eighty one
year old man who's senile. And I just think that Harris coming back in and getting the kind of media facelift that she's gotten, where you know, two months ago she was a stumbling, bumbling idiot vice president who was a radical leftist, to now she's getting this new appearance as well. You know, she didn't really believe all that stuff she talked about in twenty twenty when she ran, she was just a modern Democrat. I think unfortunately, well, it's clear that there were a bunch of Democrats who
were like, forget this Biden thing. They've all come back home, and I think there's a crowd of the double haters where like, Okay, finally someone who isn't Trump or Biden, ignoring the fact that she's the horrible liberals, that she's
got all these crazy, whacked out beliefs. She's terrible on Paul's terrible on this, terrible on that, and the idea that the way the media has been able to push walk this fine line of basically Biden's not gonna subzero her campaign because she keeps saying nice things about Biden. But basically the media has been able to try to present her as not the establishment candidate, like, oh, well, you can't blame her for anything Biden does. She's one
of the great vice presidents ever. But you know, she's not responsible for any of Biden's faults. She's a new fresh face. We can't go back. We can't go back, is what she keeps saying about Trump. It's like, well, you know, you're the If we have problems, now they're your problems. You're in charge now. So I guess that's my fear is that we had that crowd of the double haters, and I think in a Biden versus Trump scenario, they would have gravitated towards Trump. And now I'm not
so sure. I think now in a Biden versus Harris setting, they might gravitate to Harris.
All right, when we return, I want.
To do a kind of review of Lawfair, the cases against Donald Trump, where they kind of stand and how that was all just a massive thud.
Next on the John Girardi.
Show, the Democrats that sort of set up the twenty twenty four campaign around Lawfair when they thought it was Joe Biden. What they they're sort of their plan was, all right, we're going to coordinate this. We'll have the DOJ file charges against Donald Trump. Basically will will indict Donald Trump during the Republican primary process. That'll take Republicans off so much that they'll all want to vote for Trump because we want Trump as the candidate. We think
that Trump is the most beatable candidate. We think that he has a certain ceiling that he can't get over. He's never going to get more than about forty six or forty seven percent of the vote. So we will indict Trump during the Republican primary process.
Starting in kind of.
Winter of twenty twenty two, and then all during sort of starting in twenty twenty three, and then his various trials and stuff will hopefully start to get to trials.
In twenty twenty four.
Maybe we can get some convictions, maybe we can, you know, and and we'll have all these trials going on against Donald Trump, and legal action after legal action after legal action after legal action will take place, and there will be this constant stream of negative news about Donald Trump throughout the course of twenty twenty four, leading to his
numbers tanking and Joe Biden winning. The campaign that was the place plan did not really go according to plan, however, So let's review the four cases, the the four indictments that were made against Trump. Georgia Fanny Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney, charged Trump with a series of crimes centered around a Rico charge, which never made any sense.
Rico is the kind of body of criminal law that was designed to take down organized crime, designed to take down the mob and the idea is you have a kind of continuing criminal enterprise that is an ongoing thing, and you can charge people for You can charge leadership for all of the crimes of the enterprise. It was
a sort of novel, sort of federal statute. Actually, one of my professors at Notre Dame Law School, Robert Blake, was sort of the chief architect of RICO, so I got to learn a little bit about it from him. So charging Trump with RICO made no sense because the conspiracy to steal the election in Georgia, to swap out Georgia's electors for Joe Biden in favor of new electors for Donald Trump, it wasn't an ongoing conspiracy. After the
election was done, the conspiracy sort of ended. So RICO was never a great tool for doing this, and the whole thing fell apart. The whole thing is just hanging on by a thread right now. Why Well, because Fanny Willis put her boyfriend in charge of it, some guy she was having an affair with a relationship with. Now there's all these accusations of impropriety that she was appointed him to this to sort of pay him off, and blah blah blah, blah blah. So that whole thing has
not proceeded at all. The no trial has taken place, the whole thing has hung up procedurally because of Willis's own misconduct. The initial judge said, well, you either need him to get off the case or you to get off the case. That decisions being appealed about the Trump people are saying this whole thing should be tossed out.
There are new developments in the case that basically Judge Scott McAfee dismissed three more counts in the twenty twenty election indictment brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fanny Willis and her special prosecutor slash paramore Nathan Wade. This included two of the counts against Donald Trump. So that whole case is in shambles. You've got the Trump classified documents
case in Florida. This was the one thing that I actually thought Donald Trump probably actually committed real crimes.
And you know, I try to be fair.
With all my assessment of these Trump cases, this was the one where I was like, yeah, he had a bunch of classified documents that he wasn't suppose to have, or or documents with really sensitive national security info in them. He kept them in his house in Florida when he shouldn't have done that. Now it's the same damn thing that Hillary Clinton was doing, that Joe Biden was doing, and of course the one person getting prosecuted for it is Donald Trump. Yeah, tell me how that's fair. But
that case is completely dismissed. Why well, the Biden, the Biden DOJ team was just too proud to change anything. Basically, the Attorney General Merrick Garland had appointed a special council to oversee the January sixth stuff, and the same special council was made to oversee the Florida documents case Jack Smith.
So Jack Smith had been.
A war crimes prosecutor in the Hague, He's brought in to be a special prosecutor. The special prosecutor system is basically this setup where if the Department of Justice feels like they have a conflict, an internal conflict of interest, where they can't fairly prosecute something because it involves someone directly within the chain of command, like if the Attorney General did something wrong or something, then in that case, the Deputy Attorney, the second in command to the Attorney General,
would appoint a special counsel, someone from the outside to come in with prosecutorial authority, like a US attorney would have to bring charges in whatever jurisdiction he wants, whatever federal jurisdiction he or she wants to investigate and bring charges. So they bring in Jack Smith, even though there's no
internal conflict. There's no reason the Biden Department of Justice would have any conflict of interest going after Trump, of all people, it might have a conflict going after Biden because Biden's in the changing command, but not after Trump.
Now in Florida.
Basically, one of the challenges that the Trump people brought was that, hey, we're not sure about the constitutionality of this special prosecutor setup that the federal government has. We think that this isn't constitutional. That this person has executive authority, but he is not an officer of the United States who has received Senate approval. The other US attorneys who
prosecute federal crimes, they all receive Senate approval. They're appointed by the President, and they receive approval from the Senate Advice and Consent.
Jack Smith never got that.
It's not like he's an existing US attorney who's received Senate confirmation.
No, he's from the outside.
He's exercising executive authority, but he's not an officer of the United States. This violates the Constitution. Now, that was sort of considered by the Supreme Court in Jack Smith's other case. But the federal judge in South Florida, Eilean Cannon, really examined it, wrote an extensive, like ninety page really impressive ninety something Paige opinion about it and concluded, Yeah, I don't think Jack Smith has the kind of constitutional
authority needed to prosecute this case. So the whole Florida Documents case was dismissed by Judge Cannon. Now that decision is being appealed. And here's the thing is that the DOJ could have completely avoided this. All they would have needed to do is amend things, and Cannon gave them the opportunity. They could have just amended things to say, Okay, look, Jack Smith is doing this under the auspices of the US.
Attorney for South Florida, who you know.
So it's the US Attorney for South Florida who's doing the prosecuting, and he's brought in this attorney, Jacksmith, to do this work for him, Like they could have done that and would have solved the whole thing, but the Jack Smith and the DOJ people were like, I guess too proud to do that and say, no, absolutely not, we're not bending to this whatsoever. Well, get your whole case dismissed. So the Florida things kind of hung up. The charges have all been dismissed. It's being appealed, but
that's all gone the January sixth stuff. So the January sixth case got massively curtailed by the Supreme Court's decision on presidential immunity. This is basically the idea, the kind of separation of power's idea that if the president is able to function, he needs to be able to function knowing that his conversations with other executive officials, the performance of his official duties is not going to be subject
to criminal prosecution criminal scrutiny. Later on, So the Supreme Court issued this decision on presidential immunity that was pretty sweeping, where they said presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for clearly official acts, stuff that's within their core competency as president, and that evidence of their official acts cannot be brought in to be used against them in other criminal settings.
This winds up eliminating a lot of Jack Smith's case against Trump relating to January sixth stuff, because some of it had to do with conversations Trump was having with his attorney general, some of the conversations Trump was having with this executive official, that executive official, his conversations with the attorney general asking him to investigate voter fraud, this, this, this, A lot of that was stuff that was part of
Trump's official conduct, and not all of the charges against Basically, there needs to be a sussing out of which of Trump's charges have anything to do with official acts versus.
Not official acts.
Now, Jack Smith sort of brought a renewed indictment to try to bring his original indictment down into conformity with the Supreme Court's decision. But that whole thing is hung up. I don't it doesn't that that's not going anywhere, certainly not before the election. Then there's the Manhattan case by
Alvin Bragg. A jury found Trump guilty, but Bragg had brought in a whole bunch of evidence of Trump's conversations with people during his administration that that that might have been evidence of official presidential conduct, evidence that at the time Bragg and his attorneys found to be quote devastating. They got a conviction in part with that devastating evidence being brought in. So while Trump was found guilty, he hasn't technically been convicted. You're only convicted of a crime
when a judge gives you the sentence. Okay, he might have been found guilty by the jury, but the judge may throw out the jury maybe.
If the judge rules that.
If the judge determines maybe for some reason the jury acted improperly or decided the case improperly in some way, the judge has some authority in some cases to revoke that and the person would not be convicted. So Trump
is not yet convicted in the New York thing. He's been found guilty by the jury, but the sentence has not been given to him, and it looks like the sentence is now going to be pushed after the election because why well, they're going to need to decide this immunity thing and whether the evidence that was used against Trump to get the guilty verdict in Manhattan for again alleged falsification of business documents classifying the payments that were
ultimately given to Stormy Daniels as attorney's fees rather than loan repayment to Michael Cohen.
This grievous crime.
Which again paying off porn star with a non disclosure agreement to not talk about your affair. Very unsavory, very bad, very sleazy, not a crime, not a violation of federal election law. Paying back your attorney to do that also not a crime. Some argument that that his business records were falsified. Anyway, the sentencing for that's going to be
pushed after the election. So it's very odd. And when we return, I want to talk about how basically all of the law stuff against Trump is now completely ignored and instead we're just going off of Instead, Democrats have turned to a far more effective tactic.
Trump is Weird. Next on the John Girardi Show.
One of the things that surprised me about the election, I just win the last segment through the law fair campaign against Trump, all the different cases that the idea was, let's indict Trump during the Republican primary process in twenty twenty three. Trump will therefore win the primary because Republican base voters will be so mad that he's being indicted, that they'll all vote for him. They'll say, we got to rally around our guy. It's precisely what happened. Desant
has never stood a chance. Then we'll have all of our trials for Trump all through the course of twenty twenty four and it'll just be a never ending stream of Trump had news. And that's not really what happened. The trials against Trump have had very little effect on the election.
I don't think.
January sixth has had much of any effect on the election. You know what's the thing that actually worked for the Harris people that actually saw their numbers swinging. Just calling Trump weird. That was twenty times more effective. Seemingly, just calling Trump weird led to her poll numbers swinging more than all of Joe Biden's ranting about January sixth and
threat to democracy stuff. That's all they needed to do, just say Trump is weird, because I think most Americans were like, I just don't think Trump's really a threat to democracy. But you know what, a lot of Americans will agree he's weird. And I guess the more we keep talking about whether or not Haitian immigrants are in fact eating cats and dogs, in Ohio rather than we let in tens of millions of people without appropriately vetting them.
What a colossal disaster the last administration. This administration's immigration policies have been. The more we keep focusing on the weird, the more that Trump is weird is going to win the day.
That'll do it for John Girardies show, See you next time on Power Talk